We started on a Tuesday this month didn’t we?  damnit!

Well, on an unrelated note, Regular expressions kick ass.  Here’s one I cribbed together to break things on :-separated pairs with optional preceding un-paired text

We started on a Tuesday this month didn’t we?  damnit!

Well, on an unrelated note, Regular expressions kick ass.  Here’s one I cribbed together to break things on :-separated pairs with optional preceding un-paired text

We started on a Tuesday this month didn’t we?  damnit!

Well, on an unrelated note, Regular expressions kick ass.  Here’s one I cribbed together to break things on :-separated pairs with optional preceding un-paired text

‘/(.*(?!\s+\w+:|$))(\w+):(.+(?=\s+\w+:|$))/U’

Also, zero-length lookahead is sick and twisted and I liky!

Well, here’s the large KCacheGrind pics.  In order to get good pics, I installed WordPress and logged it!

So, here we go.

The first image is from the installation script.  I created the db & user, and unzipped the files.  This is what happened from the wp-admin/install.php script:

The top half has the display of “caller map”; it shows everything being called.  Each box is scaled to the quantity of time used by the function.

The second half shows the “caller graph”; at the top is “main” and then it trees to each call, which calls down.

The left-hand is the plain listing.  It shows a lot of the same data from the trace files.  Inclusive-time, is the first column.  This is the complete time spent in this function, including all subs.  The second is the amount of time spent actually in this function, followed by total number of calls.  The last one is the function name, the very beginning is a bar-graph representation of the total time.

The second image was from the admin login page.

This is a similiar picture to the first.  The top is the callermap again.  The bottom shows the functions called.   In this entry, we’re seeing the callees off of main.

The third image is from adding a new post the the blog.

This time I zoomed in on a function (WP_Object_Cache->get) , which is why the upper panel is so empty.  There are actually two sub-calls up there on the bottom edge, but they’re really small, hard to see.

The lower pane is the “caller map”, which is kindof the opposite of the upper panel.  In this case, everything that calls the Cache Get, which in this instance is a huge number of calls from “main.”

The fourth picture is from the homepage of the new installation.

I cropped it to just the upper pane.  This gives us a good view of exactly HOW MUCH goes into the homepage.  With only two posts (the default post and the one I created), it is just a huge listing.  The dark-blue speckled areas are where it ran out of things to fill into the field, because it couldn’t always slice the page in reasonable ways.

I never quite was able to configure the system to make thumbs for me, so the images above don’t link around to the full-size pics.  The gallery is inserted below, but I couldn’t figure out how to get the thumbs out of the gallery, so everything is listed twice.  Sorry.

So apparently I’m still having technical problems. Can’t get any of the images auto-resizing.

I’ve got some huge pics for the kcachegrind post, but they’re 1277×995, which seems a bit LARGE to embed in the post …

Well, the server blewout … a bout a day after my last post, honestly.  Doesn’t that just suck.

So, I spent one day (well, morning, before work for a couple hours) trying to get it back up to limp through the day for the folks who host off my system.  Got it up, but it died again before I got to the office, so obviously THAT wasn’t working.

So over the weekend I divided my time between taking my son around (my wife was out of town and it’s the first time he was away from her by more than a car trip), and migrating everything to the new server I had that I had been slowly working on.  Actually, one of the last things I was waiting for was the 10.04 update, so I was ready to do the migration, at least.  I had just been planning to do it on my own terms

So, I couldn’t copy over the mysql files directly as they’d been corrupted.  My dumps from day of had a bunch of blank tables (oops, guess that’s what happens when you dump AFTER catastrophic failure).  But!  luckily I had a dump from the previous weekend.  And since I had binary logging running, I had a full log of everything that had happened in between.

So after a full restore from the dump, the following command gave me the commands that had been issued in the meantime:

On an unrelated note, I think I’m going to set up a weekly process to dump the db and then archive the binlogs with the dump from the previous week.  Then keep the last, say, month.  Basically “logrotate” for my database

So Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS) released on 30 April, late (EST anyway) … that’s cutting the hair rather thin

Anyway, I followed the directions found at the Lucid Upgrades page, which seemed to be how it was set up already.

Then it removed 6 packages, installed 30 new ones, and upgraded 400 I think it said.    That has so completely scrolled off the screen however.

I said Yes, and it went about it’s merry business.  It’s been about 30 minutes so far, although a couple times it’s stopped for input and I didn’t catch it for a while.  First it wanted to know what used PAM modules so it could reset them with the new modules.  The second time it wanted to verify what I wanted to do about the MySQL confs; the diff showed minor changes, and I liked my version better.  Default is to retain, I thought that was a nice touch.

… continued later …

A couple other bits went by then it wanted to reboot to finalize and switch to the new kernel.  Everything went swimmingly.

Then overnight, my laptop ended up in a pool of water, sorry this post is late

So, you’ve probably noticed that last week’s post never appeared …

Partially that’s because I lost track of the date, and partially that’s because I was going to do an update from ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 on my secondary server, so I figured I’d review the process.

The idea being that I ran Slackware for like 8 years, and loved it, but quit having time for the hand-compiling management that I wanted with that system.  But there wasn’t (AFAICR) any good base system version upgrading.  There might have been, but by the time the first update would have gone, i had so many customized compiles that it would have caused more problems than help.  And my system was more up to date with latest versions, because I didn’t have to go through package testing.

Then I went to gentoo, to keep that compiled “for your use”, and it was good, except some of the things I wanted to do I had to customize too much for, and so I couldn’t do upgrades again.

So now I’m moving to ubuntu.  Most of the things I’ve looked for i can find prebuilt packages for; and the VM management seems a little cleaner than the last try through gentoo, in that I don’t need to install X-Windows on my server to install the VM servers; it’s partially because ubuntu has good docs on Xen and KVM; I think gentoo had these options too now, but not positive.

Except 10.04 is still only in RC, not yet released.  I’m figuring on sometime this week, maybe, but figured I’d post since I was already a full week off.

I’ll probably write up that post when it happens and queue it up.  Trying to get some of these queued up, but I never get a chance to take all the screenshots I want for a few of them

So, one thing I’m working on is rebuilding my home server.  And one of the big bits last time was I finally figured out how to virtualize email so I could run all the domains with different users, and not have to give everyone shell accounts.

Well, that system had a number of problems setting it up, and I decided to use a new one on the new box.  And I’m ~80% through that setup process, and getting into the complicated bits and spam and virus filters etc … and it occurs to me …

I went back and pulled up qmailanalog, which after a few tweaks to make it work (as an aside, djb writes some very solid systems, because instead of one program that does 10 things, he writes 10 programs that each do one specific thing.  usually limited options, frequently chosen at compile time, so there’s very little to exploit; otoh, it doesn’t get updated very often) let me see the send/receive stats for the server.

Almost all of the send is to junk addresses, bots guessing at addresses.  Most of the incoming is also to junk addresses.  I’m guessing a bunch of the former is bounces of the latter

Then I flipped through some of the inboxes for the users receiving mail.  It’s almost exclusively spam and virus mail (obviously the spam filters quit keeping up at some point).

So now I’m wondering … if I’m the only user receiving mail, and I can just change the few lists that still point there … maybe I should just shut the whole thing off on the new box.  Gets rid of the spam problem and any relaying/etc concerns  And simplifies the configuration overall

Well, I haven’t had a chance to look at the entries I mentioned last post.  But I DID remember an open free Certificate Authority.

CA Cert, it’s a site that allows you to register and, assuming you can reasonably proof ownership of your domain (by answering the emails associated with the registrar), then you can issue certs for your domain.  I’m currently looking at issuing certs for my mail server and web daemon.

The CACert Root Certificate isn’t widely distributed, so your users would have to add it the first time they came, but IMO it’s a little better (and possibly more well controlled) than the self-signed “Snake Oil” certs.

The only downside, that I’ve noticed so far, is that there’s no interface for building your request.  So you still have to use OpenSSL or another package to generate your Cert Req and the CSR.  I’m kindof surprised, honestly, that they don’t have that part, since that would be easier than the CA portion I would think.

So, I still want to look at the other tools, but since CACert is centralized and you can add the root cert for your users, I think it makes a decent option when you can use it.

So, as part of the MySQL SSL Replication series, I decided that I’d look up some open source CA systems.  Because there must be something better than running openssl –fifty –thousand –options –with –no –memory –or –chceking

I found OpenCA/OpenPKI ,which looked interesting.  Except as I tried to set it up, the Ubuntu distributions were in Redhat RPMs, and after converting them they don’t appear to be actual apps.  They may have been framework prereqs of the app.  But the downloading screens were singularly uninformative.

I also found EJBCA, which I haven’t tried out yet.  Partially because OpenCA sounded decent, and I figured I’d try that first, since EJBCA looks to be a much larger Java/jboss application, and I don’t know JBoss offhand.  I’ll let you know if I get it going, otherwise I’ll do the MySQL entries with openssl.

And I meant to post this yesterday, oops.

So, first off — This week’s post was supposed to either be the next in the MySQL series or the followup to the profiling post with a visualization tool.  But I haven’t vetted the instructions for MySQL pt 2, and I need to get all the right screenshots for the tool discussion.  Sorry for that folks

Now, as for what this post IS!  Last week I had to change the hard-drive in an iMac.  The old one died, so it didn’t make sense to follow the general consensus of “just add an external drive and triple your storage it’s way easier”

Also, that kind of advice is just ANNOYING.

I did not, however, remember to take pictures.  Thought of it afterward, but I wasn’t opening the functional system just to do a photo shoot.  Here’s a forum post with links to videos and photos that I used for guidance

So, instead, I’ll explain it where I can.  Also, my system was subtly different from every example I followed, so remember: YMMV.  This was a 2006 or 2007 white Intel iMac

First off, I needed a 6 Torx screwdriver.  And the new SATA hdd.  Most of the recommendations suggested rubber cement or similiar for one of the later steps, I used my wife’s scrapbooking zots.

Step 0: Lay the mac down on it’s back, monitor facing up

Step 1:  Remove memory cover and memory modules (this procedure was explained on the base of the imac, for reference)

Step 2: Remove four torx screws from the bottom of the display; these are in line with the memory screws.

Step 3:  This step is hard.  While holding in the memory tabs, lift the case off the monitor.  The sides and face around the monitor are the part that you’re moving.  I believe in the end I took a small flat-head screwdriver and jimmied a bit to get it started so that I had something to press against to open it.  Also, once it opens a little, the memory tabs are held in by the facing, so you can move your hands to somewhere less awkward.

Step 4: Carefully lift up, bottom more than top.  Once you’re clear of the bottom of the case, keep an eye on the metal tabs and lift to bring them clear.  Also make sure you don’t pull too hard as that will mess up the iSight camera.  There should be enough play in the iSight to lean the case up out of the way

Step 5: There’s a black plastic wrapping.  Carefully pry this off around the bottom and sides (bottom was perforated and I had to break it to remove it, sides were sticky-tabbed).  At the top, above the monitor, you’ll need to carefully pry the black wrapping away from the top of the monitor, but not too far.  I again used a small screwdriver to leverage and slit along.

Step 6: In theory, all the directions said I could now lift the monitor off.  This was where mine went off the rails.  There’s a long black ribbon cable attaching something to the monitor.  I couldn’t see any way to detach it from either end, and I wasn’t willing to risk yanking anything.  So that limited how far I could move the monitor.  That’s along the middle.  On the left side, there are two sets of wires leading from the board to the monitor.  I unhooked the set nearest to me.  That gave me some play in the monitor for the remainder.  You can probably remove both and get more movement.

Step 7: I had to remove two screws from the left-hand side of the hdd.  There was a metal L-plate on that side, and it was hard to tell if the screws were for the HDD or for holding down the daughter-board.  Once you’ve removed those two, you can partially lift the HDD and pull it out to the left.  The right side of the HDD has a pair of pegs that slot into holes to stabilize, so you need to bring it enough right to clear that to remove.  But with the daughterboard in the way, you have to bring it up to clear the board.  It’s a little tinkering and magic to get both aspects.

Step 8: On the RHS of my HDD was a sensor, everything online suggests it’s a heat sensor, although I’m not really sure why they wouldn’t just use the SMART data the HDD has onboard, but whatever.  Carefully pry this off.  It’s glued, so you actually have to pry this one.  Remove the L and the pegs.

Step 9: Replace L & pegs onto new HDD.  This is where the rubber cement comes in.  I stuck a couple zots to the back of the sensor and applied it back to the harddrive.  I won’t swear it’ll stay properly, but I’m not having problems yet at least.  Slide HDD back in, screw back down.

Step 10: Replace monitor, reattaching the cables you removed (I only removed the one, so I was more cramped for steps 7-9, but I only had to remember which way one cable went in)

Step 11: Crimp the black plastic heat envelope back down and restick everywhere.

Step 12: Slide casing back on, hooking the metal clips inside the casing and being careful of the iSight cords & etc.  Hold in the memory tabs while getting the case over them.  Then carefully push the case on, squeezing it down as it gets near to done and starts to stick.  There shouldn’t be any lipping remaining, or the CD might not track smoothly

Step 13: Reapply torx screws.  Re-insert memory and close up.

Again, YMMV, and I really should have had pictures, because I know that when I was looking I wanted the pics to see what was being talked about.